This video was produced by my protégé, Bijan Taghavi. Bijan is a jazz artist who has performed in Los Angeles, New York City, Europe and Asia, and currently tours with Rodney Whitaker who is part of Jazz at Lincoln Center.
Bijan began studying piano with me from the time he was 8 years old, until after high school when he attended the Manhattan School of Music in New York City where he earned a degree in jazz piano studies. He has a masters from Michigan State University, and currently teaches jazz piano at Hillsdale College in Michigan.
From the time Bijan started lessons with me, it was obvious that he had enormous talent. He amassed a repertoire of many of the blockbusters of the piano repertoire, and was part of my Living Piano: Journey Through Time: Historic Concert Experience which we performed together throughout the state of California:
While in high school, Bijan won the South Coast Symphony Competition and performed the Grieg Piano Concerto with the orchestra.
Throughout his studies, Bijan played a great deal of music in popular idioms which he had a natural affinity for in addition to his high level classical playing. Here he is in a performance at the age of 15 performing the Liszt 2nd Hungarian Rhapsody in a concert series we had in our live/work loft:
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to tell you the secrets of how to play softly on the piano. Have you ever tried to play something softly, but the notes just don’t play? You try to create beautiful melodic lines with decrescendos at the end of phrases, but the notes just drop out. What’s going on? Is something wrong with you? Is your piano broken?
It takes great energy to play softly on any instrument.
In a symphony orchestra, for example, when there is a quiet woodwind solo, whether it’s a clarinet, oboe, flute, or even a French horn solo, you’d be amazed at the energy they are utilizing in order to project the sound. Even though it’s soft, it has to somehow get out to the audience through a 60 or 80 piece orchestra. Yet it doesn’t sound loud because they are not expelling their air. They’re just putting the air under tremendous pressure with diaphragm support, much like a great singer can sing with a beautiful sustained sound and achieve whatever volume they want.
What’s the analog of breath on the piano?
I’ve talked a great deal about arm weight. It takes much more energy than you may think in order to project a quiet melody on the piano. A good example of this is the second movement of the famous Mozart C Major Sonata K545. It’s all pretty much soft throughout. If you play it without much intensity, it will sound lifeless. So you have to use some intensity. First of all, you need to overcome the accompaniment in the left hand! The accompaniment is supportive. It should be like the babbling brook under a boat floating on water. It supports it, but you don’t want to call attention to it.
One secret is to play very quietly keeping your fingers close to the keys.
Stay very close to the keys, and make sure you depress the keys all the way down. As long as the keys depress all the way in one motion, all the notes will play on a well regulated piano. But to project the melody, you have to use a tremendous amount of arm weight. What do I mean by that? I mean that when you play that first note, you are actually holding up your whole arm with that single finger. That finger is holding up your arm! You’re not holding up the arm with your shoulder anymore. That way, the weight can be transferred smoothly from note to note, achieving a beautiful line.
That is the way to project a melody in a piano context so it’s above the accompaniment.
Keep your left hand light, and just push the keys to the bottom with a minimum amount of effort. The right hand supports a tremendous amount of weight that transfers smoothly from key to key giving a singing line. And yes, it will still be piano! It’s also possible to get nuance in your phrasing, the rise and the fall of the melody as it goes up to the middle of the phrase, and then descends to the end of the phrase. Just like speaking. There is a natural rise in the middle of a sentence when you speak, and the sound tapers off when you finish. Music imitates life. And when I say life, I mean literally breathing! You have to have that rise and fall. You get the analog of the breath on the piano through the use of the weight of your arm.
Don’t be afraid to use a lot of energy.
It’s just like a musician in an orchestra projecting the melody from the back of the woodwind section. You have to do the same thing by utilizing arm weight, projecting melodies in your music that are written piano and pianissimo. That is the way to achieve it.
Let me know how this works for you! If you have questions about your piano, whether it’s capable of this, you can email me Robert@LivingPianos.com. I’m very responsive to comments, particularly on LivingPianos.com. You can post your comments on YouTube as well. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. Today I’m going to give you an important wrist technique. I’ve talked so much about how to utilize the wrist in many of my videos, as well as with my students. The wrists are almost as important as the fingers in piano playing! There’s so much the wrists allow for in phrasing, the way in which notes are connected or detached. Generally speaking, I’ve talked about how the wrists have to be independent from the arms.
If you play with your arms, there’s a limitation to the speed you can achieve compared to playing with your wrists.
The wrist also has a crisper sound. So, for example, in a Bach Minuet, you would use your wrists to articulate the staccatos. The way to practice that is with various exercises where you just use your wrists without using your arms to achieve staccatos. And one simple exercise for this is to utilize thirds, just using your second and fourth fingers. You set the metronome on 60, and play using just your wrists, not going up and down with your arms.
The arms are important in keeping your fingers exactly over the right keys.
You want to move your arms to put your fingers over the correct keys. It seems so simple, and really it is! But playing in a simple manner might be hard if you’ve never done it before. But this enables you to achieve great speed. Once you can identify the wrists separate from the arms, then you can have the speed and power to play advanced repertoire. And it’s rather effortless, because you’re only using a small amount of mass instead of trying to play with your whole body or your arms. But what I’m talking about today is something entirely different. I’ve never brought this up in any video before. It’s a different type of wrist technique.
Suppose you want something a little bit more subtle, where the staccatos are not punctuated in such a manner.
With the technique I previously described, every single one of the staccatos are accented. Maybe you don’t want that. Maybe you want it to taper at the end, yet still keep it short. For that, there is an alternative wrist technique where you come up, instead of going down with the wrist. You actually come up with the arm, and allow the wrist to just be lifeless. This way it comes off with a gentle staccato, not an accented staccato. So that’s the tip for today. If you want a gentle staccato, you can come up with the arm and allow the wrist to be floppy. You get the opposite of an accent.
Come up with the arm, and let the wrist just gently bend without any force, and you get a gentle staccato that isn’t accented.
So that’s a new technique for you to try out in your music. I’m interested in how this works for all of you! Try it out where you have staccatos that are on the off-beats, staccatos that are not punctuated, that are not to be accented. This is a way you can achieve that phrasing without accenting the staccatos.
I hope this is helpful for you! Let me know in the comments here at LivingPianos.com and YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
I recently visited the largest music store in the country, Sweetwater. Located in Fort Wayne, Indiana, Sweetwater is the second largest music retailer in the country with only one location. Guitar Center, the county’s largest music retailer, has 294 stores. Sam Ash, the 3rd largest music retailer in the U.S. has 44 locations.
I met the founder of Sweetwater, Chuck Surack in the 1980’s when his business was run from his home in Fort Wayne. He had a recording studio in his basement in Indiana, as I did at the time! I bought a high-end digital music workstation, an 88-key keyboard, Kurzweil K250 from the back of his van in a parking lot! He recently sold the business for over a billion dollars.
Last Year, Sweetwater Did $1.6 Billion in Sales!
You may wonder how such a thing is possible. I remember decades ago visiting Sweetwater when it was still in Chuck’s home (although it was a bigger, nicer home). He had a network of Macintosh computers with sales engineers fielding calls from people all over the country. He had a thriving mail order business. What separates his business from all the others doing this sort of business was that his salespeople were highly trained professionals. Not only that, but he invested in technology so that all the sales engineers could call up all the information of all the products they sold right on the computer screen along with pictures of the front and back panels. So they could provide customers with an incredible level of support. The transition to online sales was seamless. Each sales engineer undergoes 13 weeks of training before they begin servicing customers.
Sweetwater Has 600 Sales Engineers and 2,000 Employees!
The store in Fort Wayne, Indiana is like a college campus consisting of several buildings including a huge outdoor amphitheater, multiple, state-of-the-art recording studios, as well as world-class performance venues. The store is built like a mall with each department occupying different “stores” within the mall. There is a huge eating area much like a food court in a shopping mall. The distribution center looks like an Amazon warehouse.
Visiting Sweetwater is such an interesting experience. At the entrance, is something akin to a museum of music gear through the decades, from old analog tape recorders, to vintage synthesizers and other gear. These were all products that Chuck Surack had in his personal studio over the years.
You can watch the accompanying video to get a taste of what this operation is like. If you are ever in the area, it is definitely worthwhile checking out the largest music store in America!
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about when music is off the beat. Now you might be thinking, “Music that’s off the beat? Maybe it’s jazz or ragtime, like The Entertainer.” But that’s not what this is about at all. This is about hemiola. There are a lot of examples of syncopated rhythms where emphasis is on the weak beats or off the beat entirely on the “ands”, but hemiola is different. There is a great example of hemiola in the Kuhlau Sonatina Opus 55, No. 1. In the second movement there’s a big chromatic scale going up. When it gets to the very top, that’s when the hemiola begins.
You probably have come across hemiola in your music and wondered how to count it, and why composers even utilize it.
Listen to a little bit of the Kuhlau Sonatina. Do you hear the way it comes down after the chromatic scale? The grouping of notes overlap the beats. It’s kind of odd. It’s actually a pattern of two that is superimposed on this piece which is in three. So you don’t have the comfort of the downbeat at the beginning of each pattern. That, in a nutshell, is what hemiola is. It can be a very effective technique for giving a rhythmic accent that you don’t expect in music.
How do you approach hemiola?
You must count and you must count correctly! If you succumb to the hemiola and let it trick you into thinking in a different time signature where the hemiola is, it’ll mess you up. You must maintain the integrity of the time signature in hemiola. You don’t have to accent the beats. You can play it and let it be a flourish that’s off the beat even though you’re counting it correctly. It’s a wonderful compositional technique. I want all of you to check out your scores. Find places you think you might have hemiola. You’re welcome to share them in the comments here on LivingPianos.com and YouTube. I hope this is enjoyable for you and provides some insights into your music. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
Welcome to LivingPianos.com, I’m Robert Estrin. The subject today is about how great music is storytelling. This has many ramifications. For example, a great piece of music sometimes evokes images and emotions that can tell a story. It may not tell a story with words as much as with feeling and direction. Interestingly, this is also true of great improvisations. For example, listen to a great jazz pianist crafting a ballad. As it unfolds, it can remind you of so many things in your life that you can’t even put into words. That’s what’s so great about music!
A performance can sometimes tell a story.
What I’m going to do today is something a little bit different. I thought I’d challenge myself and play the beginning of Chopin’s G Minor Ballade. I will play it twice. The first time, I’m going to try to play it absolutely faithfully to the score. The second time I’m going to try to tell a story. I’ll let the notes evoke something to make you feel it’s going somewhere and keep you on the edge of your seat, wondering where it’s going next. Can this really be done? I’m going to see if I can play this absolutely accurately the first time. Then, I’m going to go back and see if I can do something more than that and tell a story with the same exact notes, markings, rhythms, and phrasing. I will add subtlety of emotion that can somehow transcend the notes. Is this possible? This is what this experiment is about today.
It’s just like the lines of a play.
The lines of a play can be read in so many different ways. Everything the playwright wrote is in there, yet each actor has a completely different feeling and tells a different story. That’s what I’m going to attempt to do now. I’ll see if I can take the same passage of music with all the same markings, the same notes, rhythm, fingering, phrasing, and expression and see if I can tell more than what is on the page.
See video for my performances of the beginning of Chopin’s G Minor Ballade.
I wonder, could you hear a difference? I’m really interested in your opinions of these two different performances. They both are accurate from a technical standpoint, all the notes that Chopin wrote were in both of them. I’m wondering what your feelings are about them, if they evoke different senses. Do they tell different stories? That’s what music is all about. It’s telling stories that can’t be told with words – stories of emotion. That’s what I believe. I’m wondering how many of you feel the same way, and what these two different snippets of the Chopin G Minor Ballade did for you. Let me know in the comments, on LivingPianos.com, as well as on YouTube. Thanks again for joining me, Robert Estrin here at LivingPianos.com, Your Online Piano Resource.
For premium videos and exclusive content, you can join my Living Pianos Patreon channel! www.Patreon.com/RobertEstrin
Contact me if you are interested in private lessons. I have many resources for you! Robert@LivingPianos.com
